Putin Is Snookering Obama

For almost a century, American conventional wisdom on Russia has been consistently, and sometimes catastrophically, wrong.

You can look back to as far as 1920, when Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz of The New Republic picked through the New York Times' coverage of the Russian Revolution and found articles riddled with ludicrous predictions of the Bolshevik regime's imminent collapse. "The news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see," they concluded.